The Best Things I’ve Read This Week: 5.17.15

A Prayer for Owen Meany -“Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend’s mom with a baseball and believes—accurately—that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.”

In Flight: En route from London to Tokyo, a pilot’s eye view of life in the sky. -“At about 30 feet above the surface of Japan I pull the nose up and begin to close the thrust levers. I feel that moment of poise: a sense that continued flight is as likely as anything else, that we have lowered the wheels but they are not yet turning upon the Earth, that a question has been asked but not answered.”

Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks -“Our email program has a time client built into it. So you can actually see in your email box who’s online and who’s not. And there’s an implicit culture [here] that if you don’t see somebody on at the same time at a certain hour of the night, you’re wondering what the heck they are doing.”

The Best Things I’ve Read This Week: 4.26.15

A Visit From The Goon Squad -“Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.”

The hacked Sony emails show how Silicon Valley dealmaking really works -“Sony Pictures’ thousands of hacked executive emails, published yesterday on Wikileaks, have already highlighted significant drama at the studio. But now that they are more easily searchable, typing a few simple keywords—names, companies, internet domains—reveals a fascinating trove of communication. These discussions include financial negotiations and personal (and professional) favors; the messages range from the mundane to the regrettable.”

The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph -“We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.”

The Weird Science of Naming New Products -“Like most namers, though, Shore doesn’t believe that computers can replace human creativity. For Shore, sound symbolism was only the beginning. He didn’t just want words that sounded right. Shore liked“natural words,” words that carried semantic and even historic meaning.”